Show notes
Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes. How to Set Goals That Will Improve Your Blog Today’s episode is about how to set goals that will improve your blog. Research shows that by simply writing goals down, you are more likely to achieve them. I find setting goals difficult, but this has definitely been true for me! Today’s episode is a special interview with Stacey Roberts, the author of the Vege Mama blog. We talk about what you can do to make sure you have the highest chance of meeting your blog goals, in the most painless way possible. In This Episode You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode: Why you should make goals instead of new year resolutions A question you should ask yourself to work out what you need to do to improve your blog in the next year 6 ways that goals can help you improve your blog How to make your ‘to do’ list more achievable 5 key areas you should set goals for your blog 6 strategies you can use to increase your chances of achieving your blog goals 3 reasons why people fail at achieving their goals (and how to make sure you avoid them) What to do right now to make sure you include goals into your blog game plan for the new year Further Reading and Resources for How to Set Goals That Will Improve Your Blog How to Do an End of 2015 Blog Audit: Take Stock of What You’ve Achieved and Where You’re Headed The Beginner’s Guide to Goal Setting – Michael Hyatt An example of a blog review post, on the Money Saving Mom blog The tool I mention that’s great for to-do lists, Wunderlist Keep your goals to yourself – the TED Talk by Derek Sivers that we mention Meet my new friend, Edgar (and a SPECIAL OFFER) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘. Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January 2015. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future. The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger. Here’s a video of how I use Edgar: If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar. Darren: Hi there. This is Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to episode 77 of the ProBlogger Podcast and the first episode of 2016. It feels a little bit strange to me saying that. I haven’t said that too many times yet because it (as I record this) is halfway through December in 2015 if I’m honest, but I wanted to get this one recorded because I think it’s so important. Today we are going to talk about setting blog-changing goals for your blog. Goals that are going to help you to take your blog to the next level in 2016. To help me to explore this topic, I decided to bring in Stacey Roberts who is the editor of ProBlogger and has been for the last couple of years now. Stacey has really been instrumental in helping me to take ProBlogger to the next level over the last year or so, one of the teams that I have brought on to help me with that. She is a little bit different personality-wise. We do talk about our personalities in this particular episode. It helped me, as well as a few other people in my team, too, to get a little bit more structured in my thinking about this type of stuff. It has really helped us to achieve so much in the last 12 months in particular. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/77 where we will include some further reading. In particular, I recall that Stacey wrote recently on ProBlogger that we’re really bouncing off in this particular podcast. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Stacey. Good morning Stacey. It’s good to be chatting with you today. Happy New Year. This is actually being recorded in December but it will come up in the new year, so I feel like I can almost compel to say Happy New Year. Stacey: Happy New Year to you, too. I feel very ahead of myself. Darren: How was your happy 34 years? Stacey: Absolutely fabulous. I was on this yacht and there were cocktails. Nah, I’m sure it will be fun. It will be great. Darren: Excellent. The reason for today’s podcast is that it is that time of year. Well, it will be that time of year when you are listening to this for our listeners, where people are after making their new year’s resolutions or setting goals. I do prefer to set goals and make resolutions, although maybe that’s a bit of a […] definition thing, but I was just thinking this morning, a good question maybe to start this particular podcast for our listeners to ponder is, is the way your blog is today the same as you want it to be in a year’s time? I think a lot of people say, “I don’t need goals,” but asking that question from me gets you thinking about change and the change that you want to bring. Maybe just to get us in the mood for why we might need some goals, you may want to pause the podcast, listeners, answer that question, and actually take it to the next step and ask yourself the question, what changes do you need to happen in the next year or how do you want it to look different in a year’s time? Maybe that’s just a kick us off question to ponder. I wondered (to introduce this particular podcast), Stacey, by saying I was going to do a podcast on goal setting and then I was looking on to ProBlogger for what I’d written in the past on that. I found a post that you had written in the past. Stacey: Not since September 1st. Darren: Was it? Ah okay. September of this year? It was really recent and […]. Stacey: I’ll give you a pass on that one. Darren: I thought it would be really good just to walk through some of the things that you wrote in that particular post. You start off by talking about why goals are important. I don’t really want to spend the whole heap of time in this podcast on that, but I think it probably is worth stating some of the things that you have said there. Do you want to run us through some of the reasons why goals might be important to make it this time of year? Stacey: Sure. It helps keep you on task and I know that, particularly for me, when I’m at home, I’ve got a job, and I’ve got kids, I’ve got very little time to spend on my blog and I don’t want to waste it. Often I do find myself wasting it because I don’t know what to do. Because I don’t have a direction, I just slander around, doing bits and pieces of nothing really at all. It really helps you keep on track of what you’re doing when you’ve got the time to do it. It also motivates you when you are so passionate about your blog and you really want to see where it can go. You have to know where you want it to go before you can push it in that motivation. It’s good for direction. It’s good for motivation and it’s good for helping you be really productive with your time. Darren: Yeah, I think for me, I pretty much have the same list of things. I think I found it very easy and maybe it is just my personality type, but I find it very easy to drift throughout the day. For my goals on a grand scale, I am quite motivated, so my goal for the year or for my next 10 years is that those are the goals that are really motivating. But what keeps me on track in the day-to-day are those mini goals or objectives that I set during the day, which really flow out of the big […]. Stacey: Yes, it does take a little bit of time to sit down and really pen those out, but it is so worth it if you do. Darren: The other thing that I found useful and maybe it’s more coming from hiring people who are good at this kind of stuff is that it gives you something to base your reviews on. As you are assessing how you went in the last year, while I don’t spend the whole […] look time looking back, I think it is important to have some way of assessing— Stacey: Yeah. It is also pretty motivating, too, when you don’t think you’ve done very well, but if you look back at the traffic we had in January and you see how it has grown, you think, “Oh, I really have actually seen some progress.” Darren: For sure. I think partly, our approach to goals often does reflect our personality type and for those listeners who haven’t heard me talk about personalities before, I am a self-confessed INFP in the Myers-Briggs test that I’ve done. I think P comes in to count TR and those are perceived as someone who is perhaps living a little more in the moment, a bit more spontaneous. I am not the most organized person in the world, so I find goal setting really hard. I often avoid this type of activity. Is that the case for you? Stacey: I am an INTJ, so you think that I would just be like super on to all of this, but I have really good intentions. I think this is the year I am going to start goals. This is the year I am going to start checking and I just never do. I have vague goals, write an eBook, but I hadn’t actually sat down and written anything and being specific in both the notebook and done it. I like buying the notebooks and the pens but I don’t actually do anything. When I was writing this, it was after an experiment of how I have done it. I realized it had made such a difference and I felt like a bit of an idiot for not doing it before. Darren: I didn’t used to spend a whole heap of time on it, but I think just having the team makes you a little bit more […]. Also, if you start paying people, you want them to be doing something worthwhile. Stacey: Yes. You want some return on investment. Darren: And getting through an outcome, that’s right. The people I have hired, I think everyone on the team is a J personality. I can’t think of anyone who is like me. Stacey: You have the ideas and we put them into place. Darren: I always forget […] but— Stacey: And where you’re working on the idea and you were like, “Hey, wait. Did I say that?” Darren: Yeah. I think a lot of the objections people have to having goals come down to I don’t have the time. I am not that type of person, maybe that personality thing, or I don’t have the framework to do it, and really that’s what this podcast is about. It is giving you a bit of a framework to come up with those particular goals. Perhaps if you can start to walk us through some of the process that you came up with in the article? I might butt in occasionally and disagree or add my thoughts as well but you started off with writing them down. Stacey: Yes. It is such an important thing for many reasons. Often, you don’t really know how you feel until you’ve written it down or you don’t really know what you want until you sit there with a piece of paper and a pen, and you’re forced to come up with something. And you realized instead of tapping into that idea of what you’re looking for. that you haven’t been able to put into words yet, so that’s really useful. It is also really useful so you don’t forget them. I am quite forgetful, so if I haven’t written it down, I think that I will remember it but I won’t. It is also really good because it makes them real. It makes them quite concrete, like this is a goal that I want. It’s not just something that’s I have an idea in the box. This is actually a goal. I have written it down, I’m serious, and now we are going to achieve them. Darren: I think you wrote in the article, people who write their goals down are significantly more likely to achieve those goals and I have certainly read those studies as well. Stacey: Yeah, and for so many different reasons, not even quantifiable reasons, but you are more likely to achieve them if you have written them down. Darren: Yeah, I think they just did the writing of them down. They become clearer as well and being able to put words around them, articulate them, makes them easier to communicate to other people if you’ve got other people if you’ve got other people working with you too. The second point was don’t have many […]. Stacey: Yes. I think part of the reasons are especially in this time of year when you’re gung-ho to start a new year, turn over a new leaf and all that kind of thing. You have a million and one ideas but to be successful in achieving the goals that you are choosing, you really have to not bite off more than you can chew. So far, it’s prone to failure. Even if you feel though you’ve so much that you want to achieve, you have to boil it down to 3–5 major goals that you want to achieve in the next year or two, and then break them down into steps because once you’ve broken them down, you realize that they actually take a fair bit of work. You might even misjudge the amount of time these tasks will take you because you think it’s over in five minutes but you aren’t. By the end of the year, you’ve only reached one of the 25 goals; you feel a bit of a failure. The best thing to do is have a smaller amount of goals, achieve them, and then move on to the bigger ones. Darren: I find this true both in business and also in personal parts of our life as well. Vanessa and I sit down usually at the end of every year and come up with our goals for the year. In the past, we used to have […] of goals. These days, we set ourselves goals for physical health, family goals, spiritual goals, and just have three or four different areas that we are really focused on. I think the family is much more likely to action any of them if we finally got the […] them as well. I wonder whether for bloggers it might be helpful to identify maybe four or five areas that you really want to work on in the next year. Maybe content is an area that you want to set a goal or readership for monetization, or design and tech, maybe just set a simple goal when each of those areas might be the way forward for […]. Stacey: Definitely. I think once you achieve that goal, by the time you achieve it, you realize where else you can go. What other goals you can achieve because you got to be flexible, you got to be a bit adjustable. By the time you’ve achieved that, you will have realized what needs changing. Darren: That’s right. The next point was to make them look smart. Stacey: It is and it’s going around for a while. It’s been the consciousness of this for quite a few years now but mostly, if you’re looking to have a goal they need to be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely. You can’t just say, “I want to be happy.” You can say, “I want to meditate 10 minutes a day, everyday for the next year. By default, that will make you happy. Being more specific about the actual wording of the goal rather than having them be airy […]. That is the very first step to making sure that you’re actually achieve that goal. Measurable is pretty interesting because lots of people make a goal that isn’t something that is quantifiable. I want more traffic where it is probably better. Again, this is being very specific to say, “I want to grow my traffic by 10% in six months,” or, “I want 500 more Facebook fans in the next year.” So, keeping that really, really specific. Actionable. The goal needs to be something that you do rather than something that you are or something that you become. […] goal that you will need. It’s better to say, “I want to have this much traffic and I want to have this much money coming in,” rather than saying, “I want to be a big blogger.” Something really actionable that you can do. Realistic. Not everybody is going to be Brad Pitt. If they are going to be acting or whatever it is, they can aim for the top, but being realistic means that you are going to be more likely to achieve it, more motivated to then create another goal, and then you are on a b…
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